Hans-Paul Schwefel

Biography

Hans-Paul Schwefel’s groundbreaking contributions to evolution strategies helped define the field of evolutionary computation and have had lasting impact on the computational intelligence community. Working with fellow students Ingo Rechenberg and Peter Bienert at the Technical University of Berlin during the mid-1960s, Dr. Schwefel's contributions concerned the first theoretical investigations and industrial application of the shape optimization of a supersonic nozzle for a one-component two-phase flow. He pioneered the shift from experiments done by hand to computational optimization by introducing the collective self-adaptation of internal parameters within evolutionary algorithms, which helped to make such methods effective and efficient. He later introduced evolutionary principles beyond variation and natural selection into the algorithms to handle special features of the search space. In 1990 he was co-founder of the international conference series on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN).

An IEEE Fellow, Dr. Schwefel is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Technical University of Dortmund in Germany.